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Church Social

Pearce Hansen

Rita can't believe how calm she feels, sliding the shells into the pump shotgun's magazine. It's actually a little disappointing: something like this should really stand out, really justify all the preparation. Instead, she feels so fucking — normal. She finishes loading the twenty-gauge, rolls it up in a beach towel on the bed, and leaves it there as she checks the rest of her gear one last time.

The tote bag's heavy on her shoulder, but it doesn't bother her; she's been pumping iron for a while. She humps it down the darkened hallway, the wrapped shotgun in her hand.

Then she's abreast the open door to Carl's room. She turns to look in as she passes. Her husband hovers over his computer in the dark, lost in one of his endless war games, losing himself as he had since the day Eric had disappeared. Carl peers up at her, corpse-like in the flickering glow from the screen. Rita realizes they haven't exchanged a word in days.

"Nothing," she whispers. “Nothing at all.” Her husband faces back into his world, and she continues out into hers.

She's in the car, driving the speed limit. The tote and shotgun are in the trunk. She knows she should stay focused, but her mind wanders.

She imagines how it must have been for Eric. The coroner said that Eric was alive throughout everything that was done to him.

An image always came to her mind, unbidden: Eric, bound to a chair, gagged with a rag and duct tape – then a man's thick hand, reaching out to rip the shirt from Eric's back in a single motion.

Terror. Violation. Agony. He'd have tried to call out to her many times, and at the very end of course ~ but she hadn't been there.

She swoops the car over to the curb and sits hunched over the steering wheel with her eyes closed. She grips the steering wheel so hard that it feels as if her knuckles will burst through the skin.

As he always does, Eric comes to her then. "It's all right, Mom," he whispers. "It's all right." She even feels his small hand, caressing her shoulder. She screws her eyes shut even tighter, knowing that he won't be there when she opens them. After a while Rita continues driving.

She eases the trunk shut and stoops to pick up her tote. This is a residential area, the blocks all bisected by gravel-paved alleys. Rita crunches down the alley to its end, out of reach of the inquisitive street lights. She stops at the edge of the paved church parking lot, next to a large sign listing all the church's various activities.

Church: "Yeah, right!" Eric sneers to her. Rita had heard about this place long before, but it had never touched her life ~ even during the endless waiting when Eric vanished. But when the police finally found the shallow grave up in the hills, and she was forced to identify what was left of her son – when everything unraveled and the Bad Times began – Rita had lots of time to think about it then. 5150, she remembered them calling her then – but she’d thrown away their name the night she threw away their meds.

Actually, the place was a church, except at night. At night, the church building was used for social work, serving the community. Various self-help groups met there, twelve step programs, things like that. And one night a week, the group therapy sessions met in the basement: court ordered group therapy, for convicted child molesters.

The basement windows ran the length of the building, yellow light spilling from them to pool like curdled butter in the parking lot. She imagines the talking heads inside, spouting their manipulative rhetoric to the nodding doctors. Well, God knows she's had her fill of psycho­babble.

She slings the strap of the tote bag over one shoulder and goes to stand behind a dumpster. Shaking the wrapping off the pump shot gun, she jacks a round into the chamber and props the gun against the wall. Rita pulls a ski mask out of the tote and dons it. She picks up the twenty-gauge, depresses the safety, and marches across the lot as to war. The open basement door draws her forward irresistibly.

Crossing the door is like piercing some invisible membrane. A haze settles across her vision as she stands there anonymously masked, holding her shotgun at the ready, suddenly hesitant. As so often before, she feels that Eric is looking through her eyes with her – she hears him growling like an angry puppy. Rita pans slowly across the dozen staring faces, wondering if it was one of them that did her son.

Then a gaunt horse-faced woman sets down her clipboard and uncoils from her chair. The woman approaches Rita slowly, hands outstretched, smiling benignly like all the doctors at the institution had. "I can see you're in pain," she intones in a soothing voice. "Well, no one here is a stranger to pain ~ we can help you ..."

The shotgun blast punches the therapist in the stomach and lifts her off her feet to skid on the floor, trailing a splatter of her own guts. She looks surprised.

Everyone in the room stands frozen for a moment — then they explode into action like cockroaches fleeing a kitchen light:

An obese hulk of a man waddles toward her in a comical attempt at a lunge, screaming "Bitch! Bitch!" Rita blows his face into ruin, and he topples to the floor in a flopping heap.

A goggle-eyed man with the face of a kewpie doll scampers toward the basement's other door. Her shot clips him off at the hips, and he slams down onto his side. His eyes bulge even further as he looks at what was left of his legs, and he begins a high-pitched keening. Irritated, she shoots him in the neck, blowing his head half off.

One more target, clumsily attempting to clamber out the window. The buckshot hits him dead between the shoulder blades, and his arms convulse outward like he’s crucified as he sails back-first to crash on the floor.

"You got 'em, Mom!" Eric watches avidly from the back of her brain as she scans the seven cowed survivors sitting in a disordered arc of metal chairs. They are completely in her power, but the feeling doesn’t give her the satisfaction it seems to giver Eric.

She sees a child with one couple, and she frowns in consternation. Then Rita sees a wisp of a man holding a clipboard, another therapist, and she smiles inside the armor of her mask as she takes a slow step toward him. He cringes back in his seat, raising the clipboard like a shield.

Therapist? Rita thinks. Apologist.

"How many have you gotten released?" she asks gently. "How many do you keep free for the sake of your job?" He opens his mouth to reply, and she shoots him in the groin. He slumps from his chair to lie on his side in the fetal position, grunting weakly for a few seconds before he dies. Rita drops the empty shotgun to clatter on the floor at her side, and draws her .38 from her shoulder holster. She isn't in the mood for a debate.

Rita turns toward the couple with the child, facing the wife squarely. The woman quivers against her husband as Rita aims the revolver at them in a two-handed grip. The pasty-faced man pats his wife's back, unable even to meet Rita's gaze.

"You had to know." Rita is calm as she addresses the woman. "But you stayed with him. You knew, and you let him do it anyway."

"You don't understand," the man blurts, still staring at the floor.

"No, I don't," Eric says. Rita shoots the pasty-faced man once in the chest and once in the head. He slides like a sack of grain from his wife's arms, who squawks as she attempts to hold him upright. One round to the body, one to the head, and the wife follows her husband into death. Their chairs scrape across the tile floor as the couple's sagging bodies push them crookedly back.

Three men and the child left, ducks in a row. One of the men is praying silently, his lips moving; another is blubbering and shaking in fear. She drops both of them in quick succession, with two more head shots ~ she knows she's running out of time.

The last man has wet himself, the urine soaking down his pant's leg and puddling beneath him. It's clear from his unfocused look that there's no fight left in him. Good.

Rita turns to the child, a little blonde-haired boy of about ten. He stares at Rita like a huge-eyed statue, too stunned even to be afraid. It’s strange: she can tell he doesn’t resemble Eric in any way, and yet part of her still insists he looks just like her dead son.

Rita extends the pistol and wills herself to pull the trigger — but nothing happens. She doesn’t care what all the doctors had said in session, she knows the boy will grow up to become a monster himself— as Eric would have, if he'd lived.

She has to save him from himself, as she would have saved Eric if he'd survived – but she just can't bring herself to lay this child down. She’s too weak, she supposes.

Finally, she turns from the boy with a shamefaced snarl and shoots the last freak in both knees, then holsters her pistol as the man thrashes to the floor, his folding chair booming metallically onto its side behind him. He wriggles like a doomed fish on a boat deck, whooping and clutching at his legs. "Please!" he howls. "Please!”

Rita reaches carefully into her tote bag, withdrawing a stoppered glass bottle of hydrochloric acid and a taped-handled straight razor. She leans over, glares into the little boy's wide eyes from behind her mask, and whispers to him, "Watch ~ and remember!"

"Do it, Mom! Do it!" Eric crows in exultation from the black void of her soul as she steps forward to finish the job and give her son his final rest. The screaming seems to last forever. But really, it is over rather quickly.

***

Rita exits the church at a brisk walk, having been inside less than five minutes. Still no sirens, but there are several people standing on lawns across the street from the church. One of them points at her, seeing her carrying the shotgun openly — she ignores them. The child is still inside, alone and unharmed, sitting frozen among all the dead meat.

Kneeling behind the dumpster, Rita grabs the towel and rolls the shotgun in it. Still no police, but she can hear sirens in the distance now.

She removes her mask as she stands, and that's when she sees it on the church sign next to her – today's date, followed by these words: "When Your Child Dies - A Workshop For Helping Parents & Siblings To Cope." Her head whirls as the significance sinks in, and she staggers where she stands.

Then Eric's presence fills her to overflowing, fills her with a numb kind of strength. She hears the gloating tinkle of Eric's laughter, scraping at the inside of her skull. "Right place, wrong night," he giggles, louder than she’s ever heard him, but still for her ears alone. "We’ll do better next time," he says, but he doesn’t sound regretful at all: he's fed now, and he's fully awake. She dives into the alley as if escaping (as if escape was possible).

She’d come hear tonight to lay Eric to rest. But, as she runs through the shelterless darkness of the alley toward their car, running as if she could run forever, Rita realizes that Eric isn't going to rest for a long, long time.

Copyright(c) 2006 by Pearce Hansen

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